SoftBank Weighs Debt-Heavy Financing in $500 Billion AI Push
- Stargate may tap complex, high-leverage project finance model
- SoftBank, OpenAI spend on datacenters as DeepSeek seeds doubt
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A few weeks ago, SoftBank Group Corp. founder Masayoshi Son stood alongside US President Donald Trump to unveil the Stargate Project, an artificial intelligence venture with OpenAI that could cost $500 billion or more. Now Son is figuring out how to pay for it.
The Japanese billionaire is looking at a technique called project financing that is sometimes linked with oil and gas projects, according to people familiar with the matter. The strategy is used to build capital-intensive, large-scale infrastructure projects like the Trans-Alaskan pipeline — and has the big advantages that it typically requires less money upfront from anchor investors and can resort to long-term financing based on the project’s expected cash flows.